Advertisers, retailers and businesses are interested in understanding consumer behavior. Consumers use multiple retail channels such as websites, call centers, mobile applications, and physical stores to research and purchase consumer goods, products and services. While browsing the web for such items, a consumer is typically unidentified, unless the consumer (1) has registered or established an account with a retailer and (2) makes the effort to login to the account prior to engaging in the browsing activity.
If a consumer cannot be identified with a certain degree of accuracy, cross-channel advertising and analytics as well as consumer profiling and pricing will have to rely on general statistical data and demographics gathered about a general crowd or audience to which the unidentified consumer may belong, in order to decide the type of content that should be presented to the unidentified consumer. This may result in unwanted content delivered to the consumer and also is not helpful in building an accurate profile for individual consumers.